Recently, I purchased “Story trumps structure”, by Steven James. I was attracted to the book by its provocative title and the foreward by Donald Maass, who I much admire. Although the book is mostly a manifesto for organic writing (‘pantsing’), as opposed to plotting and outlining, it is still an excellent read for all types …
Tag: Story structure
Story structure and story beats
In some of my previous blogs I've talked about the importance of story structure. It's a subject that's fascinated me since I first started writing fiction. Some great writers ridicule the idea of an underlying story structure as being too formulaic. They say it's based too much on the 'hero's mythical journey' or it's not …
Holding back the backstory
To make your characters come to life, you need to understand their lives before your story begins. Part of fun in writing is getting to know your characters. One of the ways is to prepare character sketches of the main characters. This should be more than just a a visual description of the height, weight, …
Bad guys aren’t necessarily all bad
Unless you’re dealing with satanic supernatural characters, an easy mistake for new authors to make is to assume that the antagonist has to be the epitome of all evil. In practice, the bad guy may well think he’s his own hero. He just sees things differently from the good guy. Like the hero, he has …
Plot and character – the chemistry
So what type of stories do you write: character-driven or action-driven? When thinking about your story ideas, do you start by imagining an interesting character, or do you start with some interesting ‘what if’ events and then consider the character? It doesn’t really matter where you start, but you need both character and plot to …
Does your middle sag?
I don’t mean your waist line that might be suffering from that late night snack attack. I mean that author’s graveyard – the middle of your story when enthusiasm wains and your characters wonder what they’re doing, and you wonder why you ever started the story. Unless you’re one of the literary giants like Stephen …
What a novelist can learn from the movies
It’s almost eight months since I published my first novel and I’ve only just written the opening scene of my second novel. It might seem a long time in planning, but I haven’t been working on it full time and I wanted to make sure that I had the right story and I understood my …
Busy daydreaming
It’s over a month since I published “Collision” and I have been busy thinking about what to write next. It will almost certainly be in the sci-fi genre and set in the current day or near future. It’s not that I don’t like space operas or dystopian future worlds; I just don’t think I can …
Finally published!
On the 29 October 2012, and after nearly two years in development, I published my novel, "Collision - A Sci Fi Romance". It took less than an hour to actually publish the book on Amazon. Even for a technophobe like me, the process was simplicity itself. I simply followed the input screens on Amazon and uploaded …
JMJ Williamson 